The Art of Energetic Aikido

Judo flipping our challenges into beautiful experiences

“It’s a fascinating paradox that the most resilient people have usually lived through hell. And those that have had very nice privileged lives are often the most fragile among us.” — Seerut Chawla

I’m sitting in a coffee shop and prepping for our 100 days program to start, and contemplating how I can work with fear in a way that transforms it into an opportunity.

I feel fear on a regular basis. At least 3 times a day I have an intense, sometime overwhelming experience, of being scared of death and of the void.

I’ve been curious about how to relate to the experience of fear differently. In his book Seeing that Frees: Meditations on Emptiness, Rob Burbea shares an interesting perspective

The Hero100 that we’re building at Phoenix Culture can create an container where we train the energetic aikido of resilience. We get hundreds of opportunities to face the fear of doing the practice that we’re scared of. When getting ready to jump in the cold water we are forced to face the contraction of fear in our bodies and learn how to bring spaciousness and courage to that experience such that it doesn’t level us.

The goal with the Hero100 is to make fear our friend. To learn a more skillful way of relating with the fear that so often stops us from doing the things that we know we need to be doing.

I love the frames of energetic aikido and building adaptability and resiliency in the face of each situation that we experience. Each moment is unquestionably unique. You will never experience a situation that is exactly like this ever again and therefore we must be adaptable to this circumstance. We can’t expect that what we experienced yesterday will help us to be courageous in this moment. We must see that this moment is asking of us our totality and we can’t coast in life. In each moment there is fear, because in each moment there is a death.

To do energetic aikido on each moment. If there is a challenge that life is throwing towards us we learn how to aikido flip it and use it towards your own advantage. Anger is energy that can be channeled into something beautiful. Fear is just contraction that gives us an opportunity to practice spaciousness and allowing amidst uncomfortable sensations.

On another note, I’ve been sitting with the importance of choosing specific character traits to develop and clearly moving towards them. This is what I’m committing to accomplish as part of the 100 days challenge.

The character traits that I will develop throughout this challenge are:

  • Learning how to set stronger boundaries

  • Saying No to everything that is not a ‘fuck yes’

  • Greater confidence in how I speak (speaking from the gut instead of the throat)

  • Much, much stronger decisiveness

    • embodying the insight that most often any decision is better than no decision. most decisions aren’t permanent and can be learned from.

Life is far bigger than birth and death. Birth and death are not two ends of life; many births and many deaths happen within life.

Our goal with the Hero100 is to initiate you into your personal Phoenix journey. To create a container where, if you do the challenges, you will experience an identity death and will get scalded in the fires of becoming someone different and will fly away at the end a different being entirely.

We close the doors tonight at midnight. Will you join us?